Total Mayhem

by John Gilstrap

  She’d only made it three or four steps around the corner before the distance erupted with the sharp pops of gunfire. Within seconds, a wave of screaming people swelled from the street down below.

  She keyed her mic. “We were wrong,” she said. “The attack is now. It’s underway right now!”

  She didn’t care about Kellner anymore. He was gone. So, who had opened fire down below? Was it from the sniper’s nest they’d identified? How could it be?

  Unless Kellner wasn’t working alone this time.

  The gunfire was relentless, but it didn’t sound like rifle fire she would have suspected from a sniper. It was softer and sharper, more like a pistol than the throaty boom of high-powered, large-caliber ordnance.

  The she got it.

  She keyed her mic. “Be advised, I think the shooter is using a suppressor.” Translation: the near total lack of a muzzle flash would make him very hard to locate.

  Halfway down the hill, she encountered the bloodied and terrified patrons of the Dueling Pianos bar as they spilled out onto the sidewalk and street.

  “Someone call nine-one-one,” a voice shouted. “Oh, my God, we need an ambulance!”

  Gail swallowed the lump that formed in her throat from the realization that there’d be many more ambulances needed tonight. And with the piano bar victims being four blocks up from the real slaughter that was evolving, these people may be waiting a long time.

  She fought the urge to stop and help. It didn’t feel right to focus on these pistol wounds when there would be so many horrific rifle wounds to contend with down below.

  She took off at a run. After a few steps, an explosion rattled everything, and all the lights went out.

  * * *

  Lauren rubbed Jimmy’s balls some more. It was her game to keep him hard, so he’d be embarrassed when he stood. It was also a promise for later. “Okay, you were right,” she said. “This is pretty lame.”

  “Gotta love the view,” he said. “I think I’d recognize any one of those butts anywhere I saw them.”

  “Plus, I’m learning Japanese,” Allen said.

  “That’s Korean,” Ashleigh corrected.

  “Whatever,” Allen said. Jimmy sensed that he was pretty much done with her, oral prowess notwithstanding.

  The invading family had never sat down and never shut up. The youngest of the group—maybe eight or nine years old—kept dashing back and forth in the gondola to see the different views. At one point, the older of the two kids planted his feet on the plastic bench where Jimmy and his friends were sitting and stood there looking outside.

  Allen snarled at the kid and made an excellent imitation of a feral dog growling.

  The kid hopped down and stayed away for the rest of the ride. The kid must have said something to his dad because one of the older family members gave Allen the stink eye. God forbid they actually, you know, raise their kids.

  “Parent is a verb and a noun,” Allen said to the father. “Keep a leash on them.”

  Ashleigh was aghast. “You can’t say something like that to someone else’s child,” she said.

  “I didn’t say jack to the kid,” Allen said at normal volume. Clearly, he wouldn’t have minded if this escalated to something bigger. “I said it to his lazy father.”

  “How about you dial it down a little,” Jimmy said, sotto voce. “This is way too small a space to rumble.”

  “It’s also too small a space to run around like it’s a playground.”

  Jimmy had known Allen since their first day of kindergarten, and knew that he was smart as hell, but the boy had no filters. He often joked that it was even money whether Allen Wade would get a Nobel Prize in literature or a life sentence for killing someone who crossed him.

  “Not now, okay?” Jimmy said. “We can trash talk the hell out of them afterwards, but for now—”

  His peripheral vision caught some odd movement down on the ground, and it pulled his attention. People were scrambling about, as if in a panic. “What the hell is that?”

  He pointed, and everyone moved to his side of the gondola to get a better look.

  “Oh, my God,” Lauren gasped. “People are falling. Just collapsing.”

  “Jesus, is that blood on the pavement?” Allen said. “It is! It’s spraying out of that lady’s neck. See? Over by the fountain?”

  The Asian family was seeing the same scene, and they started to yell and cry. The parents pulled their kids close to them.

  “It must be an active shooter,” Jimmy said, drawing from the lectures he’d received at school. “But I don’t hear any shooting.”

  “The car is soundproofed,” Ashleigh said. “Wow, a lot of them are going down.”

  Thock.

  One of the Asian ladies dropped to the floor of the gondola. Instantly, blood was everywhere.

  “Jesus!” Jimmy yelled.

  Thock.

  A bullet hole materialized in the window behind Allen.

  Thock-thock-thock-thock-thock . . .

  Splinters of plastic and seat foam erupted on the inside of their gondola as the shooter took out his wrath on them.

  Jimmy wrapped his arms around Lauren and pushed her to the floor, trying to shove her under the bench, but Ashleigh had already taken up most of the space. “Make room!” Jimmy yelled.

  Ashleigh stiffened and expanded her occupancy of the space.

  “Aw, come on, Ash—”

  A crushing impact hammered the center of his right shoulder blade and knocked him into the plastic seat. At the same instant, a hole erupted in the seat, and he knew he’d been shot. He tried to throw himself to the floor, but a second bullet blasted through his left thigh before he could drop all the way. He landed hard on the floor, knocking the back of his head on the wall. Arose of blood and tissue had erupted out of his jeans, and he found himself screaming, even though nothing really hurt yet. His head hurt more than the wounds.

  For now, he felt only a searing heat in his leg and shoulder, but mostly, things were numb.

  And the bullets kept coming. What the hell? Why the hell?

  Feeling began to return. He could feel the heat of his blood. And he could smell it and taste it.

  He dared a glance down at where he wanted his shoulder to still be, and except for a hole in his leather jacket, surrounded by a little poof of blood-tinged lining, everything looked normal. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he thought. He reached with his left hand under the leather, and his fingers found hamburger. Jimmy-burger, he thought, and he found a way to smile.

  In the midst of the screaming, he called, “Lauren! I’ve been hit. Are you okay?”

  He only heard the voices that he didn’t care about.

  Jimmy tried to lift his head, but that lit up something in his neck that reignited the searing pain in his shoulder. “Ow! Shit! Lauren!”

  A voice arrived in his left ear. “Dude. Ah, Jesus, look at you.” It was Allen.

  “Is it that bad?” Jimmy asked.

  “I don’t know, man. But legs aren’t supposed to bend that way. But I think the shooting’s stopped.”

  “How’s Lauren?”

  The silence that followed wasn’t really silent at all. The wailing and crying had a kind of physical force to it. It was overwhelming. It made the gondola reverberate with grief. But through it all, Allen fell quiet.

  Jimmy tried to turn his head to eyeball his friend, but the pain wouldn’t let him do it. “Tell me, Allen,” Jimmy said. “Please tell me.”

  “Just relax, Jimmy,” Allen said. “We’re going to get you help.”

  “Tell me, goddammit! Where’s Lauren?”

  Allen rubbed Jimmy’s hair. Kind, gentle strokes. “I’m sorry, Jim,” he said.

  Jimmy felt the emotion rising, and with it the pain blossomed to excruciating. He knew what was coming, but for some reason, he needed to hear it. He needed Allen to feel the pain of saying the words as punishment for still being okay.

  “She’s dead, man. Instantly, I’m sure of it.”<
br />
  “You can’t be sure.”

  “Yeah, Jimmy, you can. Trust me. Ashleigh, too.”

  Jimmy didn’t give a shit about Ashleigh. “What about me?” he asked. “How eff’d up am I?”

  Allen never stopped stroking Jimmy’s hair. It felt good. A gesture of kindness in this swirling tornado of evil and death.

  “We’ll be on the ground soon enough,” Allen said. “Then we’ll get you to a hospital, and you’ll be fine. I won’t let you die.”

  Jimmy felt tears running toward his ears as a crushing sense of hopelessness and helplessness enfolded him. He forced a smile and said, “You’re not going to kiss me now, are you?”

  Somewhere out there in the night, an explosion shook the air.

  In that same instant, the lights went out.

  * * *

  Kellner was wrong to second-guess. Setting the C4 on the electrical transformer was the smartest thing he’d ever done. With the FBI bitch on his tail and Steve going to work on the crowd, instant darkness was everything he needed to get away. When he pressed the four-digit code on his cell phone, gratification came instantly. The blast wasn’t as startling as it might have been if the shooting hadn’t started first, but it was big enough to reverberate off the bricks even four blocks away.

  As the electric lights went out, the alley to the side of the piano bar transformed from charming to menacing, reminding Kellner of what the streets of White Chapel must have looked like during Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror.

  The people up here were free from danger for now, but there was no way for them to know that. In the dark, he was able to mingle with the bloodied and the wounded and disappear into the mayhem.

  Sirens split the night, but as the cadence of Steve’s gunfire picked up, those emergency responders were going to be spread so thin that only the most grievously wounded would receive treatment. Actually, that wasn’t true. The really bad cases that would have qualified for a medevac and quick trauma surgery—the kind of heroic efforts that fail more than they succeed but are worth doing anyway—would be left to die. That was the nature of triage. The patient with only a 20 percent chance of survival without intervention got priority over the one with a 50 percent chance. But the guy with only a 10 percent chance? With so many patients to tend to, he would be left to die.

  A well-planned act of terror affected everything and everyone at more than one level. And this one was brilliant.

  But good old Steve would have to finish it on his own. Kellner had had quite enough close calls for one night.

  The time had come for him to retire.

  The first step on that journey was to stay out of the line of fire.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Jonathan heard the gunfire and knew in an instant that they were too late. He hadn’t considered that Kellner might have accomplices. He keyed his mic. “Gunslinger, where are you?”

  “I’m on the main road. Freedom Plaza. It’s really bad, Scorpion.”

  “Big Guy?”

  “On my way,” he said. “No one do anything until we’re back together, right?”

  “Just stay out of their sights,” Jonathan said.

  When he got to the bottom of his hill, he turned right and sprinted toward the place where everyone else was sprinting out. Everyone, that was, except for those who were on the ground because they were scared or because they were hit. In the darkness, people and landmarks were just dark objects against dark backgrounds. Thanks to the gaslights that were unaffected by the power outage, the pools and streams of blood had a luminescence about them.

  This was huge. Jonathan hadn’t counted the rounds fired, but after so many years in so many gunfights, he had a feel for these things. His gut calculated them to be in the hundreds. And the asshole kept firing, and people kept falling.

  And no one was shooting back.

  Well, that shit was about to change.

  “Where are you, Gunslinger?” he asked over the air.

  “At the base of America Avenue,” she said. “A cop’s been hit.”

  “If past is precedent, a lot of cops have been hit,” Jonathan said aloud to himself. He picked up his pace.

  And the gunfire continued. They were easily a minute and a half, two minutes into the attack, and the shooter seemed to have no intention of letting up. At the rate that people were dropping, it seemed that many of his shots were aimed and accurate. This was a bloodbath.

  Other than managing somehow not to get shot, his first order of business was to get more firepower than the .45 that was strapped to his hip.

  When he found Gail, she was on her knees, tending to a wounded police officer. He lay on his back, a human island in a sea of his own blood while she applied a tourniquet to a spurting wound in his leg. Another cop lay dead of a head wound, sprawled just two feet away.

  “Thank God,” Gail said when Jonathan joined her. “Give me a hand.”

  Jonathan didn’t reply. Instead, he went to the dead officer and lifted him to a sitting position. He wrestled the man’s slung rifle off his shoulder and ruined head and laid it on the ground. Then he stripped the Velcro of the cop’s vest and wrestled that over the cop’s head as well and put it on himself.

  Jonathan didn’t care about the protection provided by the vest—the guy hadn’t inserted any plates, so he might as well have been shirtless against rifle fire. The pouches for the guy’s extra magazines were integral to the vest itself, and since Jonathan was about to go and pick a gunfight, he wanted as much ammo as he could get.

  After he’d donned the vest and slung the rifle over his own head, he realized that Gail had been talking to him. Whatever she was saying, it could wait.

  “Get to cover, Gail,” he said. “You’ve done what you can for him.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “We started this,” Jonathan said. “Now, I’m going to finish it.”

  He started his long sprint to the Golden Buoy Hotel.

  * * *

  Gail felt overwhelmed by it all. The screams. The moans. The thrashing of the wounded, the stillness of the dead. And the blood. Oh, good God, the blood.

  The police officer she was attending—his name tag read HINTON—was the first wounded person she’d encountered after getting to the bottom of the hill, so she went to him. He’d been trying to press on his femoral geyser with one hand while fishing for the first aid pouch on his vest, but the blood continued to spew. She took control and grabbed his tourniquet.

  Now that she was done, he lay so quietly that she didn’t know if he was alive or dead. Jonathan had been correct. There literally was nothing more she could do for him. Not here. Not now.

  “Gunslinger!” a voice boomed. She snapped her head around, and there was Boxers, his chest heaving from the exertion of his run. “Where’s Scorpion?”

  “He said he was going to end this. He took a rifle and ran off toward the hotel.”

  Boxers kicked at the pavement. “God dammit! This is why we don’t split up.” He bent to Officer Hinton and dragged him to a sitting position by the collar of his vest and roughly relieved him of his AR15.

  “Hey, be careful!” Gail said.

  Boxers laid the cop back down. “He’s dead,” he said, and he stripped three mags from Hinton’s vest.

  “Are you going to help Digger?”

  “Haven’t decided yet,” Big Guy said. “I might kill him, instead.”

  Alone again among the carnage, Gail found herself overwhelmed. She didn’t have another long run in her. Not now. Not after everything else.

  Digger was right. She should seek cover and take it.

  But she wasn’t going to. Not with this many wounded and not with the rest of her team in harm’s way. Like all members of SWAT teams everywhere, Gail had received high-end combat medic training when she was with the Hostage Rescue Team. She didn’t have any supplies, and she didn’t have any help—not yet, anyway—but she had skills, rusty though they may be.

  Gail stood, then bent and t
ore the first aid pouch off of Officer Hinton’s vest. While bent, she also checked his pulse. Boxers was right. Hinton was dead. That meant he didn’t need his tourniquet anymore. She released the windlass from its anchor loop and let it spin itself off. Then she unhooked the attachment and pulled the woven nylon free from his thigh.

  She noted with grim sadness that there was no spray of blood anymore.

  “I’m sorry, Officer Hinton,” she said. “I tried.”

  And now she had work to do.

  She could still hear the gunman firing away, but for now, he seemed to have shifted his focus to another direction. Of the people on the ground, the wounded outnumbered the dead, but the numbers were astounding. She didn’t have time to count, but it had to be north of fifty.

  In the darkness, everyone was a shadow. Gail had a penlight on her belt, next to her holster, but she didn’t dare use it. Bright light in a sea of darkness would undoubtedly bring the shooter’s sights back around to her.

  “Who needs help?” she said softly, but loud enough to be heard within fifteen or twenty feet. “Listen up, people. Please be quiet.”

  She heard shushes among the wounded. “I’m with the FBI. You’re not safe here. If you are wounded and can move, get inside a building. Right now, while the shooter is focusing the other way.”

  “Where are the police?” someone asked. “The fire department?”

  “I can only assume that they’re on the way. Now, please move.” What she didn’t say was that with the number of police officers who’d been killed or wounded, none of the civilians would be high on the first responders’ priority list. She also didn’t mention that if the local operating procedures were like those at every other place she’d worked, the firefighters and medics wouldn’t be allowed near this scene until the shooter was secured.

  A few people stood easily, but more stood uneasily, clearly in pain but ambulatory. As they did, Gail started to check those who couldn’t stand yet clearly were alive.

  The first patient she came to was a teenage boy who’d been shot in the belly.

  “What’s your name?” Gail asked.

  “Oh, God, it hurts.”

  “I know. My name’s Gail. What’s yours?” To hell with the cover names. Right now, nothing seemed less important.